My petit voyage to France

When I travel abroad with my family, I sleep badly. I have dreams about cheating in maths exams, or bunking confirmation classes and sucking face with old boyfriends behind the church. These dreams evoke a pastiche of terror and excitement – at some point I know I’m going to get bust. It’s the same with overseas holidays. Something always goes wrong.

My all-time favourite is returning to Joburg from Italy last year. Our luggage gets mysteriously checked through to Cape Town and I’m the donkey designated to bring it back home while the rest of the family skips off the plane in Joburg. Three hours later, the plane is still grounded as air stewards march up and down the aisles vainly searching for four missing passengers.

Yes, I am the person who holds up Turkish Airlines for six hours at OR Tambo until they manage to pick out thirteen suitcases from the container on the tarmac and boot me off the aircraft. Threats of Midnight Express and hisses from the other passengers still echo in my ears.

As we travel to France for a family vacation this year I know I’ve seen the worst. I can cope with any surprises. But the nightmare of me dancing on a table sans underwear should have warned me otherwise.

Two teenage girls, their brother, the children’s father and me arrive safely at our rented accommodation in a beautiful part of the Languedoc. It’s Cathar country, the place where brave heretics held out in fortified castles against Papist land grabbers until eventually they were brutally crushed.

A renovated water mill is to be our home for the next two weeks. If only we can get inside. We can’t find the keys under the rubbish bin next to the garage so we play treasure hunt for the keys. It’s a lot of fun, but after two hours of screaming hot and cold we contact the owners in England to give us some clues. They don’t pick up the phone. Like the Cathars of the Languedoc, the water mill resists our invasion.

It’s still early afternoon so the family goes food shopping, trusting that someone will arrive to let us into the house. I stay behind holding siege on the stoep, reading Peter Harris’s In a Different Time. We zoom up and down the highway to visit the Delmas Four in Pretoria Central together. With Peter at the wheel, I know all will be well.

Four hours later as the groceries melt in the boot of the car, we manage to push one of the teens into a window on the top floor of the house. She can’t open the doors from the inside and is now too scared to climb down again. We consider breaking down the door. I keep the faith with Peter, reading until it grows dark, waiting for the phone call from Lusaka that will allow my Delmas prisoners to appeal their death sentence.

A couple of hours before midnight we have given up hope on the keys. We are en route to find the only hotel in the Languedoc that is not fully occupied by enthusiasts attending a popular cycling festival. Then a call comes: the housekeeper has opened up the house. We have been given a reprieve.

Over the next two weeks we visit the Cathar castles and hear stories of how communities had noses, ears, tongues and lips chopped off, and eyes gouged out to set examples to other dissidents. I threaten similar action to the bickering brats in the back of the car.

To keep the peace after one too many tearful car journey, I am dispatched to sit in the back with the two teens while the tortured boy-child finds sanctuary in the front with his father. They show me no mercy. I learn the hard way about twenty-first century Chinese bangles; how to finger-flick a person’s ear to ensure maximum pain, and the delivery of agonising arm punches that leave interesting bruises.

We tire of tortured Cathars and their castles and visit the mysterious Rennes-le-Chateau, the inspiration for The Da Vinci Code and the place where priest Berenguer Sauniere discovered something which bore fruit to numerous theories about the Holy Grail. It’s all a lot of nonsense of course, but 20 000 people are attracted by the stories of buried riches and visit the small village every year. This year it’s 20 005 gullible people.

We discover our own treasure. In week two, the oldest teen spots three white truffles in the driveway to the house. They are worth a fortune. These mushrooms that look like an alien’s brains will pay for her gap-year and buy her a car and a villa in Cape Town.

She and her sister take the largest truffle to the pharmacy in the nearby village to seek positive identification. She carefully unveils it from the safety of her sock.

“What is this?” she asks the pharmacist in bad French. He stares in astonishment at her outstretched sock. “It eez a sock,” he tells her.

She goes red, shakes her head and points to the alien’s brain. She searches desperately for a credible tale to mask her embarrassment. “My leetel seester, she want to eat it,” she says in bad English, patting her mouth for emphasis and pointing at the sister glowering behind the shelf of shampoo.

The pharmacist looks at her and the leetel sister like they’re stupid, or British. “It eez not consumable,” he says, imitating the mouth patting gesture and shaking a warning finger.

They both take a while to recover from this setback and I am allowed to return to the front seat of the car. It’s going to be smooth sailing until we get home.

The last stop is a night in Paris. We are returning from breakfast when the leetel sister realises she has locked the card-key inside the room. No problem, the manager gives her another to open the door. She plays silly buggers with the card, shoving it in and out of the slot watching the light click on and off. It’s a pack of laughs until the light stops flashing. Five cards later, the manager calls someone to break the lock in time for us to liberate the luggage and catch the plane home.

On the plane I fall asleep and dream that I’m caught smoking in the aeroplane toilet. My filthy habit causes the plane to crash. I am falling through the sky into the sea and me and the family are stranded on an island.

We have discussed this scenario on the holiday – we are flying Air France after all. The consensus is that I am the expendable participant in Lost: I can’t cook, I’m directionally challenged and I nag. I will be eaten first. The disgusting boy-child will be used as fish bait.

I blame my nightmare on JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, which I read on the train between Perpignan and Paris. It’s about a horny old professor who euthanases unwanted animals. Nicely written with an incongruous plot.

I try not to fall asleep again. I watch movies and allow one child to spread himself all over my lap. And another to use my head as a pillow. I think about getting home. I think about opening the door and hugging the cat. I wonder where I put the house keys. I flash back to the sight of them on the bedside table in Paris.

At home, the leetel sister is shoved onto the roof of the locked house and manages to break a window and let us inside. We are home safe.